7 Video Game Easter Eggs Designed to Screw With Your Head

Video game Easter eggs come in a variety of flavors. Some are meant to amuse the player, some are meant to creep the hell out of the player and some ... some have no discernible purpose other than making the player go what the actual fuck?

#7. Silent Hill 2: The Dog Ending

The Silent Hill franchise is generally recognized as one of the most terrifying game series ever produced. It's all evil gods and twisted limbs and beings with geometric objects for heads.

So these games are pretty freaky to begin with, but somehow, a secret ending for Silent Hill 2 managed to make the entire franchise even weirder. The second game is about James Sunderland, a widower who goes into the haunted town of Silent Hill to look for his dead wife. To see the coveted ending, you need to beat the game at least once and play it over again to find a bone-shaped key, which grants you access to a secret room.

It may take you as many as three playthroughs to get this right, but it's totally worth it, because once you open the door, you'll find ...

... a dog in a headset, mucking around at a control panel. Apparently, everything that happened in Silent Hill was his work -- that isn't us talking, that's the game.

"Now it all makes sense!"

Realizing that the search for his wife has all been for naught and he's been a puppet of a freaking dog all this time, James falls to his knees for the small comfort of said dog licking his face.

Then the credits roll to circusy organ music, accompanied by yapping dog sounds and random pictures. And we mean random.

This is what a brain stroke looks like.

By the way, this isn't the last we see of the dog -- in Silent Hill: Origins, one of the endings has an alien beaming down to help the protagonist get his missing truck back. Wanna guess who's with him?

Now we know why the fans hated the movie so much: No dog ending.

#6. Gears of War 3: Magic Chickens Everywhere

Gears of War is a dark, gritty trilogy of shooters where the planet is in ruins at the hands of alien invaders and the only thing between humanity and extinction is a bunch of muscular soldiers pattering on about their missing fathers and wives while shooting said aliens to shit. It's not a game where you'd expect to find a hidden race of chickens with magic powers, but life is full of surprises.

Perhaps we should elaborate. In the first level of the third game, you'll come to a docklike area with pipes. At one point, a chicken jumps out of one of those pipes.

Just a regular ol' pipe-dwelling chicken.

Now, as a video game player, your first instinct upon seeing the harmless little hen will most definitely be to shoot it ...

Did we learn nothing from the Zelda games?

... at which point it will magically transform into a giant golden chicken and come at you with a vengeance.

And then, if you manage to kill it, it will explode into confetti, of course.

Of course.

Somehow, this isn't even the most baffling of the game's chicken antics. If you're playing on the hardest difficulty setting and don't disturb any of the dead bodies at the beginning of Act 4, you can find a chicken wearing a neon-trimmed pirate hat in a storage room. This one skips the fire-breathing bit and goes straight to the "exploding into confetti when shot" part.

"Seriously? What do I have to do to get some chicken wings?"

However, this is actually the beginning of an optional side quest for a secret weapon called the Cluckshot, which, as you've probably guessed by now, is a rocket launcher that fires exploding chickens. And yeah, you can kill enemies with it, or yourself, if you're not careful.

#5. Contra: Hard Corps: Beat the Disco Robot, Become a Prehistoric Monkey King

Contra games are usually pretty straightforward: You walk in the same direction, shooting everything that crosses your path until you get to the boss. Contra: Hard Corps for Sega Genesis, however, lets you take a small detour from the main game if you find the hidden man in the top hat, who offers you a chance to partake in something called the Battle Arena.

"All you have to do is put on this thong and ..."

If you accept, you find yourself in a secret room where you have to fight a disco-boots-wearing, Afro-having robot with cool shades who attacks you with a whip and shoots fish pastries at you.

Really should have seen this coming.

When beaten, the Disco Robot will erupt into fish pastries and explode.

This is how all video game bosses should die, always.

Your next opponent is a giant zombie in a dress pushing around her baby slime monster in a carriage with a turret on the front ... but you know what, this still makes more sense than the previous guy.

This is precisely why you say no to men with top hats.

And finally, the third opponent is a robot who warps around the room by ripping holes in the fabric of space, and who manages to look really out of place here by at least resembling a normal Contra enemy. So then you go back to the normal game, right? Nope: Defeating it will cause your character to get sucked into one of its portals ...

... and get sent back to the Cretaceous Period, where he'll find himself surrounded by freaked out monkeys and a really thrilled Apatosaurus.

At this point, we're not even surprised that the monkeys have glasses.

Cut to several years later: Your character is now king of the monkeys, for lack of anything better to do.

Those monkeys are livid that he got the sexiest monkey wife.

The motherfucking end. Credits start rolling, and it's over. Oh, what's that? You wanted to return to the normal game? Then we hope you remembered to save before you walked into this insanity, buddy.

#4. Perfect Dark: The Hidden Cheese Wedges

Perfect Dark was the spiritual successor to GoldenEye 007 on the Nintendo 64, only instead of being James Bond, shooting Russians in the crotch, you're Joanna Dark, fighting an alien conspiracy at Area 51. But, as you go through the game, you may stumble across a different, far more insidious conspiracy: There is a single piece of cheese hidden in every level. For some reason.

Seriously. You can find them behind grates ...

Air vents: Not just for hiding serial killer blood slides.

... on shelves ...

... in the toilet ...

It's that or a really big piece of corn.

... and so on. There are 22 pieces in all, but you can't pick them up or photograph them or even eat them -- the game gives you absolutely nothing for finding them all, other than the depressing feeling that you've wasted a significant portion of your life tracking down and looking at pixelated cheese.

And it's not like they're a piece of cake to find: You have to go through some absurd measures to find some of them. A couple require you to complete little challenges, like not being seen or not taking damage for the first part of the level, while others require you to look through the sniper scope to catch a fleeting glimpse of them.

Who was the first person to find this, and what went wrong in their lives?

We can only speculate on why the game's creators did this. Maybe Area 51 has a mouse problem and the cheese is poisoned. Maybe the pieces of cheese are remnants of a more complex feature that the company scrapped during production. Or maybe they're just fucking with us. We'll never know (but it's definitely the last one).